On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 1:00 PM, Joe Watkins <krak...@php.net> wrote: > Morning All, > > Further to discussion in IRC this morning, I'd like to propose > what amounts to, I guess, a sub-project to properly document everything, > starting with everything declared ZEND_API in /Zend. > > We put a lot of effort into the generation and maintenance of user > land documentation, but there are only scraps of information here and > there, and then ... the accepted way of working with the source is lxr and > lots and lots of reading, which is fine, if you require intricate knowledge > of every part of the API you are interacting with, which normally you do > not, usually it is enough to know of it's existence, it's usage and > implementation is either obvious or irrelevant in the vast majority of > cases, should the function prototype be documented. > > I am also aware of some documentation included in the PHP manual > currently, which should also be completed, and included, with all of the > API in a searchable format, just like PHP is in userland. > > Ideally, it would be nice to document the API inline, in source, > this means disturbing lots of files, which I'm not keen on, if anyone has > any ideas, speak up. The benefit of inline documentation is that if a > function is changed the changer has the documentation in their peripheral > vision, and the chances of documentation getting stale are less likely than > if they have to document using some separate system. > > I'd like to gauge reaction to this idea, and with it a show of > hands, who can actually help ?? > > Thanks for listening :) > > Joe > > -- > PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > > Hi,
I think that it everybody would support that idea, unfortunatelly not many people have the knowledge AND the time to write up that kind of documentation. Keeping it up-to-date would be less of a problem, as we could put the burden of updating the docs on that person changing the code. Personally I think it would be nice if we could have inline comments in the code, and using doxygen (or similar) tool to generate some html representation for the docs (helly used this for documenting spl: http://www.php.net/~helly/php/ext/spl/ ). But we also need to have some more high level documentation, where we introduce the concepts and how the pieces fit together, that could be under http://php.net/internals2 I'm curious what others think though. -- Ferenc Kovács @Tyr43l - http://tyrael.hu
